What is the most contagious thing you can name?
You might be thinking about infections – nasty, tiny, hard-to-detect “bugs” such as Ebola, the flu, pneumonic plague. It’s interesting that, when we think of contagion, we first think about germs, overlooking another candidate category that spreads faster than the most infectious virus or bacteria and does so quite visibly.
Emotions.
Remember a recent time when you felt angry. Or afraid. Or filled with laughter. Sometimes those feeling states build in us, growing from a set of experiences or series of ruminations. Many times, however, they burst onto our emotional scene, unannounced, causing an almost spontaneous reaction. A friend tells a story that horrifies. Public safety texts a severe weather warning. A colleague shares a joke. We are suddenly indignant. Or we instinctively consider flight. Or we can’t stop ourselves from laughing.
Such experiences don’t necessarily make us volatile or mercurial people – although we may be so inclined, individually, based on personality. They make us human. They remind us that we are, by nature, social.
We are contagious.
I’ve been trying to pay more attention to my own personal contagion. The exercise has proved revealing. I sometimes furrow my brow because I’m not wearing my glasses and I can’t see something. Two days ago, I was doing just that, standing in front of a hospital cafeteria refrigerator case. An older woman who was passing by walked between me and the case, looking at me. I wondered what I’d done wrong. I was ready to be worried or annoyed until she said something to me about not taking all the choices in the refrigerator case too seriously. I squinted and reached in my pocket for my glasses. “Just can’t see them all,” I said. She laughed, then I did too. And then other people around us turned to see why we were laughing. They joined in, smiling hesitantly. Who would have thought that my fuzzy-eyed frown could launch a cascade of positive feeling? A momentary interaction between two strangers had turned caffeine-depleted myopia (mine) and medical employee understanding (hers) into smiles and good will throughout our little corner of a busy hospital.
Part of life is learning how to immunize ourselves against some human emotional contagion. We can’t, of course, be recruited by every emotion we encounter. It is important to learn state control. It is vital that we bring cognitive awareness to daily life situations, recognizing the feelings being expressed by others around us, tempering and translating our own physiologic reactions to those emotions into responses that can calm rather than inflame, support instead of antagonize. Fatigue need not lead to frustration, frustration to anger, and anger to argument.
It helps me to peer through the lens of compassion. Yesterday, during a day of plane travel, I tried to see people around me not as obstacles or competitors or just a faceless crowd but rather as individuals, extended family members, relatives that I somehow knew. It made for an interesting day. The guy next to me who seemed to think that not only was the arm rest between us his but so was part of my seat on the other side of the arm rest? Oh that was just one of my cousins. He’s a struggling CEO and is afraid the CFO of his company is trying to take his job. I gave him space. I offered to help him hold his water glass when he couldn’t figure out what to do with all the papers and file folders and food he had around him.
How about the server at Starbucks who rolled her eyes when I didn’t realize that I was next in line? She became a niece. She’s working two jobs and doesn’t have enough money this month to pay the rent for the family apartment. Her husband moved out two months ago. I asked her how busy her day had been. She told me that there had just been a huge line of impatient people. I gave her a good tip and thanked her for helping me.
Reverse contagion occurred. My CEO seat mate improved awareness of his boundaries. The Starbucks server smiled and said she hoped I’d come back again.
We tend to assume that emotions are brainstem-moderated functions that occur as reflexes, as if we cannot control them. We also tend to assume that the flood of our people’s emotions is something to be avoided, a tsunami that inexorably swamps all in its wake. Neither is true. We don’t need to immunize ourselves against difficult emotions by deadening our reactions to them or engagement in the lives of those around us. We can turn the tides of negative contagion through our own conscious emotionality. And our heart.
Compassion. Catch it if you can.